CATCHING SIGNALS THAT SOUND IN THE DARK



Thoughts on Jeff Mangum at the Lincoln Theatre, 1/28/12

-My usual stance is that I don't pay to hear the audience sing, but this show was an exception. And as phobic as I am about singing in public myself, I even made it a point to join in on at least one line, out loud. I ended up choosing “And this is the room, one afternoon, I knew I could love you”...

-The most popular singalong moment came from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea: “Can't believe/How strange it is to be anything at all.” But I've always been underwhelmed by this particular line-- strikes me as the sort of lazy philosophizing that goes down between bong hits. So I kept my mouth shut.

-Mangum himself was strong voiced and sonorous, and it was impressive to hear him stretch out vowels like taffy: “I am listening to hear where you aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrre”...

-His stage manner was open and engaging, but with an undercurrent of guardedness. “If you sing along at home, there's no reason you shouldn't do it here,” he said early on. Later he encouraged the crowd to ask him questions.

“Where have I been for the last decade? Being happy and enjoying life,” he answered in response to one...

-This was the second show I've ever seen that had what appeared to be a real honest-to-goodness curtain call. After Mangum played the two pro forma curtain-call songs, he left the stage and the house lights went up. The crowd continued to cheer, but began moving reluctantly toward the exits. Well, we were halfway down our aisle when he came out on stage again, and sat down to play Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone. I didn't see anyone returning to their seats-- we all kind of just froze where we were and listened on our feet.

-While Oh Comely is a powerful song, I have to admit that I have skipped over it more than once. But this passage from the middle of the song was a highlight of the show:

The father made fetuses with flesh licking ladies
While you and your mother were asleep in the trailer park.
Thunderous sparks from the dark of the stadiums
The music and medicine you needed for comforting
So make all your fat, fleshy fingers fingers to moving
And pluck all your silly strings and
Bend all your notes for me and
Soft silly music is meaningful, magical
The movements were beautiful
All in your ovaries
All of them milking with green fleshy flowers
While powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines,
Smelling of semen all under the garden
Was all you were needing when you still believed in me

I realize it doesn't scan quite as well as, say, prime Dylan. But when you parse out the movement in the lyrics from a degraded sort of fecundity ("The father made fetuses with flesh licking ladies") to a more pure and natural one (“All of them milking with green fleshy flowers”), and the role of music in that transfiguration, it gains immeasurable gravity. And then when you hear the song itself rolling like “thunderous sparks from the dark of the stadiums” the frisson is palpable.

-Oh Comely is a song both for and against sex...